


The Komatsu Wombat and the Fantastical Anticlimax

by pettiot



Category: Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Dystopia, M/M, Satire, Suburban, australiaian, conversational, cultural cringe, miners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-02
Updated: 2010-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:09:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22521535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: Set in Kalgoorlie's SuperPit, grunt-level miner Katashi meets Arunta, the long-legged ruck rover of his dreams. Happily unreliable, Katashi tells his and Arunta's story from before, through and after the end of the world.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A Version 1 of this story was originally published in [Imaginary Beasts - Apocalypse Edition](http://community.livejournal.com/imaginarybeasts/26565.html), January 2010.

It'd happen whatever we did. Arunta couldn't get over it.

Buried alive with the rest of the world, locked away forever. Born to a bad time and a bad place, so close to the end. The scheduled date even got treated like something to look forward to, giant red signs scattered through the CBD counting down the days.

To the second, Arunta Williams knew how many years of sky he had left to him. Reckon the inevitability scared him more than the rest of the apocalypse. One morning he woke up and couldn't stand the shit taste of fear. He conscripted to the Pit, aged 20.

After he conscripted, Arunta ginned about Perth for a week before he had to head out. What with the drug tests, he behaved himself right up to the last day, which is when the panic took him and he did what new diggers did and pissed his fortnightly advance up on a wall. Clear as catastrophe he was a digger, even without him drunk and telling everyone who didn't care.

'So go on,' said the someone pissing beside him, 'tell me about your hole, if you ain't gonna shut it.'

'Wouldn't believe the fucking posters they had on the wall, mate. Panorama don't justify the name. A big boy's bloody sandpit, full of massive trucks and shovels. Come on in and muck about!' Because Runt was Runt, and probably because he was holding his cock, he decided it'd be a good time to add, 'Seeing as I'm a digger, and I'm going to save your life, the least you could do is suck me. I'll even shake first, how about it?'

Runt arrived at the Pit, hung over, with a pearler of a black eye to boot.

* * *

I've a reputation as a talker, but Runt was something else. I swear he talked the ears off emus. His first day, he pulled a 12-hour operational getting his Komatsu Wombat from Perth to Kalgoorlie, then he leaned on the back of my chair, rubbing red road dust more into his sweat than off his arms, and yakked the whole 40-minute drive to the Pit.

Not the bloke I would've expected to faint on his second day. even if the thermostat read 53 degrees Celsius.

Don't bloody ask about the relative humidity.

* * *

Arunta's first day, which came before his second day, he got the usual hand-holding from his section supervisor, lucky me. Ah, he was all right, our Runt. At our pissbreak was the closest he got to complaining, when he said, 'Fuck me, it's hot down here.'

'Sure, sweetheart. Bend over, suck in, make it easy for us.'

Runt was still trying to work out the quickest way out of his suit. He stopped, one leg outside and his shorts, even the hair on his legs sweat-soaked to the skin, and he grinned as if it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

On Runt's other side, Daz said, 'Katashi's mother kicked him out of town on account of that so called sense of humour.'

Arunta kept grinning. 'Nice of her to share. A generous woman.'

'You saying my mother spreads it round, Arunta Williams?'

'Nah, Tash, nah. Wouldn't say a word against your mother. She's lovely. Accommodating lady.'

Daz snorted at his tiles, while I shoved Runt over by the shoulder as he laughed. Imagine: six foot four of lanky muscle, and he giggled at his own jokes.

I held out my hand and hauled him up, then showed him how to get out of his suit.

Working the snap-lock buckles, I told Arunta the only place on earth hotter than Kalgoorie's SuperPit was Coober Pedy, where the caves went down to the depth of the magma strata, cooler than the outside. 'At least in Kal, get up to the surface and you can still piss where you want. In Coober Pedy it turns to steam before you can get to the first A in Australasia.'

'Reckon that's bullshit.' Arunta wasn't paying any attention at all my demonstration of the thermoseals, looking down at me, his face close to mine. His eyelashes were long.

'Yeah. I like saying magma. You try it. Mag-ma.'

'Don't never believe anything Katashi says,' Daz added. 'Shit talks like a shittalker. Ain't no A in Oz, for starters.'

Runt leapt away from me when Daz spoke, and lurched to the urinal. I took up station beside him, looked over to glare at Daz. '"xcept for you, arsehole.'

Runt hemmed and hawed, hips rocking forward. 'Bet I could put the P in Australasia Pacific.'

'Jesus, Williams, that's the biggest cock I've ever seen.'

Of course I looked.

At which point Daz crowed, 'Made you look.'

Bloody Daz, bloody suits, bloody need to keep near-naked beneath them. 'Holy shit, that is the biggest thing this side of Sydney.'

Daz took his peek.

Quick as you please, Runt backhanded him across the face. 'Made you look. 5 bucks, or I do a 20 dollar special.'

'I wet myself now, you wankers!'

'That's the 30 dollar special.' Runt wriggled his sticky shorts upwards, climbed back into his suit, zipped up, set on his mask on last, in half the time to get out of the ensemble. 'It's been fun, supe. Let's get naked again soon.'

'Well on your way to 2IC, mate.'

'Better get back to it.' Arunta threw me his biggest, brightest grin, then winked at Daz, and grabbed his own crotch. 'No hard feelings, hey, mate?'

6 hours later Daz helped me pour 8 liters of beer over Arunta's head in the mess, trying to cool the new kid down and getting more than a bit in Arunta's big mouth.

Must've been fun, working his second day with a double hangover.

* * *

When Runt fainted, I grabbed him, threw my shoulder under his arm and hauled him towards the nearest lift.

Talking to me 1 minute, gloves off, mask tucked in by his elbow, the next minute he collapsed, his rolled-back eyes bright white against the dirt. I'd seen it before, usually I'd let the buggers fall and buzz a medic, or if I liked them, I'd make sure they didn't crack their skulls on the way down.

Except there I was, carrying a mightily heat exhausted Sleeping Beauty up to the surface without any of the other diggers knowing he'd fainted. As if 2.10 meters of ruck rover with a black eye could ever be called a princess, any more than the SuperPit could be called super. Not like our Pit was out saving babies from runaway trains.

If they'd seen Runt lose it only 48 hours into the piece we would have ribbed the merry fuck out of him. No idea what I was doing, keeping his little swooning fit between him and me.

Well, I liked him, didn't I?

* * *

Then again, Arunta was always off, reckless and edgy like his grins, rising from somewhere beyond the intense stare to surprise the fuck out of whoever amused him most. Not the kind of person you'd take out on a pub crawl in case he glassed someone for a laugh. So we liked ribbing each other down the Pit, made the day go quicker, but provoking Arunta always felt like jumping on a rope bridge trying to make it snap.

Yeah, except more fun.

Safety was a big deal those days. Felt bloody good to forget about it.

* * *

Ignoring the signs and drills, the OHS posters, the memorisation tests, this was my basic procedure for surface visits in those lovely sunny days before the storms:

1\. Remove $3.4M worth of Komatsu Wombat interface, otherwise known as 'a mask'  
2\. Whack on $40 worth of goggles, to keep out the Alien's glare  
3\. Make sure said hung-over and unconscious mate's goggles are on, and check his water bottle  
4\. Hope you didn't forget your sunscreen that morning  
5\. Swear yourself blind at the Alien's glare.

After the storms started no one came back up, not for a long while. Me and Runt took every chance we got.

* * *

I poured half of his water on Runt's face, in a thin stream until he came out of his swoon, puckering up like a dying fish, floundering about.

'Shit, K-Katashi, get your fist out of my face! Why am I wet?' He licked his lips. 'This isn't beer. Did you piss on me?'

'You wish, sweetheart, it's water. You alright now?'

'Aw, man! Why does no one I like ever piss on me?'

So Runt didn't deserve the black eye he wore so well, but someone probably thought he did.

'Uh, wanna get out of my way for a sec, supe?'

As soon as I moved, Arunta curled up and puked his liver out. He wiped his mouth, made wet sounds, and mistimed the upchuck so it came out his nose.

'That is so much better out here than down there. I've been holding all morning, fuck!'

I congratulated him on his willpower, and asked him if he was ready to go back under. 'In your own time, mind, not like we're saving the world out here or anything.'

'Katashi,' Arunta said, goggles full of hopefully water, 'Daz was right, your mother's a bloody saint, and you are a fucking failed comedian.'

* * *

Funny thing about Daz. I found out years later he'd wanted me to speak for him at his funeral. He died at 75, a good run for his generation, trying to save his granddaughter from the fires that took down half the city, back during the riots.

I would've gone to his funeral, probably would've given the speech like he'd wanted, but by then I was trapped with 300 people on one side of a cave-in, 2 499 700 people on the other.

* * *

I started work on the Pit 5 years before Runt did. When Arunta conscripted, only 2 of us diggers were left from my first days: me and Melanie.

The diggers lived in Kalgoorlie, and trail-biked to the Pit through carpets of wildflowers, which grew on the tiniest layer of red dirt like the dust gathered on a windowsill. They needed less than flyspit to sprout. We didn't need goggles, either.

About 2 years after I started digging, the Alien's early warning fragments hit, which put something chemical into the air that mucked with what was left of the ozone, and made the glare damned rude on the old eyeballs.

Too much for the wildflowers, hardy as they were. Kalgoorlie lasted for a while before they did what most settlements were doing, shifting operational hours to night. The diggers moved into the Pit not long after, to spare ourselves the gauntlet of the long drive.

Which was a pity, because I'd gotten used to Kalgoorlie. Nothing like blue cop lights flashing through the curtains to soothe a bloke to sleep.

* * *

Thinking about Melanie now makes me feel old. Melanie Sunshine signed to the Pit the same year I did, aged 15. At least Daz was old before I'd known him, and died before I got there.

After the storms started Melanie shacked up with a lad and raised 2 kids underground. She died not long ago in her bed in New Port, which was a bloody original name for our first post-storm beachside settlement.

I visited her once. She lived in a big old house with the world as a yard, the kind you'd only see in storybooks if you were born in the Pit. Sitting on her porch step, grandkids playing fetch with a half-wild puppy in the mud. Those kids weren't letting the dog do the work, they were running after the ball as well, which sort of defeated the purpose of throwing it if they hadn't been enjoying themselves so much.

Melanie offered me a cigarette. 'How do you reckon the dogs survived?'

'Same way we did. Found a bloody big hole, ate cockroaches, maybe each other, and waited it out.'

'And here they were, waiting for us for 30 years. 30 years, Katashi, of a dog-eat-dog world,' Melanie Sunshine said. 'You and Runt missed the worst, on the other side of that cave-in.'

'Yeah, I know. I count my fortunes every day.'

* * *

Before the Alien came along, the Pit used to be a gold mine. Except gold meant less than piss with the Alien coming. What we dug out of that Pit was space and survival. The old gold-digging machines, sifters and sorters and whatnot, sat around rusting until we needed the metal for a replacement part.

In the shade of one of those rusting Mitsubishis Arunta Williams, 2 days into his contract, told me how he'd gotten the black eye.

'I deserved it,' Arunta said, pensive. 'I'm not normally that rude.'

'Usually wipe, do you?'

'I usually say please. And you?'

'You really don't want to go back under.'

'Am I that obvious?'

'Well, yeah, but not about that. It's all right, you know. Big damned adjustment, living down under. You're doing fine.'

'Daz reckoned you started at 15.'

'Yeah.'

'Don't know how you could.'

'Didn't have a choice, mate. Daz was right, my mum conscripted me off the bat.'

Runt pulled his legs to his chest, wrapped his arms around suited knees, and said, 'So how about you tell me about your hole.'

'It's 6 point 6 kilometres wide.'

'And slippery when wet?'

'There's another 6 kay of tunnels radiating off in all directions. Pack half a civilisation into there.'

'As long as they mind their heads. No shoving.'

'It's half a kay deep. You'd spit and never see it land.'

'Depends on whether you're at the top or the bottom, I suppose.'

'Yeah. Good point. Smartarse.'

Something else I learned about Arunta: he'd brave any weather to get his fill of sky, heat, glare, acid storms and what, he didn't care. He had hungry eyes, and I was the only one fool enough to keep him company.

After a bit of quiet, he said, 'Can I take my goggles off?'

'Not for long.'

'Fuck!' He put them back on quick-smart. 'Ow. You bastard.'

'Told you not for long.'

'I've never been out of Perth. Lots of red. Not half bad out here.'

I patted the cracked earth beside me. 'Not half bad, you hear?'

'You gormy cheesehole,' Arunta said, laughing. 'When's the cover coming?'

'The work crews come in about 3 years. They're doing the foundations now. Ask HQ, they'd know more.'

'As long as I'm here to see it go up.'

'Making sure it's done right, are you?'

Arunta shrugged. 'Something to tell the grandkids.'

Which is what I'm doing now, so to speak.


	2. Chapter 2

Something about the end of the world no one expected: we had 3 generations worth of time to get used to our annihilation.

Praise be to evolutionary technology, we spotted the rock cluster early on. After 20 years of study we knew the fucker and the groupie cloud would hit us. Not us-us, Australasia us, but that didn't matter. The impact winter was going to be the downfall of human society, and so on.

No one wanted their name on it, as though someone would be around to curse them after, so we called it the Alien.

Too big to blow up, but some countries indebted themselves to outgunning our Alien anyway. Waste of time. Which, mind you, we had. Put every firework in the world on the Alien, and at the best we'd kiss its pimpled arse. The fucker was dense.

Was the inevitability, see. The shit taste in our mouth of knowing and wishing we didn't, as though being dumb beasts toddling around a jungle would've been better. So, after working out we couldn't blow up the Alien, wars came along like you wouldn't believe, because we were angry and wanted to glass something in the face.

Then someone dreamed up the salvation arks, and what a crock of shit they turned out to be. Governments and rich fuckers financed the idea, thinking they'd host the world's best through the worst. What with salvation being selective. 

The idea didn't get far. My parents weren't even born yet when the arks were destroyed in the wars.

I remember being real puzzled in school, when we were taught about the whole leaving the planet idea. Some supremacist nation sanctioned thefts of famous works of art, to stow in their ark--but only the worthwhile art, mind. Like anyone can say what's worthwhile, culturally speaking. 

Me, I would've left the paintings behind. What did paintings matter if we didn't have any painters?

* * *

Now, I am a work of art, but no one tried to steal me for their secret salvation ship. I'd take my shirt off and show you how much of a work of art I am, but better for us both if you trust me. Arunta liked inking and I was convenient. Never got a single tattoo himself, bastard.

Runt was as good at inking as making coffee. I worked out the bit about the tattoos our first leave together. I showed him around Kal's great cultural sites, stables and brothels and brothels called stables, and pubs, a fish and chip shop a day's drive from any water. Yeah, we walked past a church or two. Kalgoorlie had plenty of culture. Drinking culture, digging culture, yeast cultures, and the occasional kabuki shakespeare troupe that'd make out from Perth, before the storms put a stop to easy travel.

I slept off the hangover from the big night out, while Runt talked his way into tattooists' next door. Made friends easy, when in the mood. He bought enough rum for them that the next time we went out, they let him put me face down in their chair.

No big deal, I thought, and let him add to the bits and pieces of work I'd had done since I'd turned 13. Bad idea getting shirtless around Arunta: having someone I wanted to screw needling me felt a whole world of difference from being tattooed. 

Those early days in Kal, Runt got me conditioned to the buzz so bad, I'd crack a fat even just walking past a parlour.

* * *

We met Ulawa in the Pit, somewhere in Sokambalda. He was the artist who let Runt finish off my back, wasting his special imported tea on us and chatting while he watched.

Runt's freehand always surprised him. Runt just didn't look capable of sitting still for the hour or 2 to wrap up a design, but I guess Ulawa never saw the way Runt looked when he drew. Like he was out of this world, and nothing here would break his focus.

Lochiel let Runt start on my sleeves, but Runt picked a fight with him before long, so we finished off my arm in Allison's backyard boutique. Took 4 years, every time we had a boring weekend, except there weren't so many of those.

But that was all after the Alien hit.

* * *

Our 21st birthdays, 22nd, 23rd, Arunta and I shared before the Alien hit. 

By the time we worked out we should've been fucking, he'd managed to cover half my back with his mark. Probably a bit late, I ask him where he'd learned to ink. 

'In lockup. 5 years before I signed up at the Pit, juvie, then bent into Hakia correctional.'

I didn't want to ask him why, so I said, 'That would've sucked.'

'Not anything like you do, precious. And you?'

'And me what?'

'Carn, Tash. Where'd you learn to take it smiling? Not Hakia, or I would've known you before.'

'Nowhere, mate. I was free as air.'

'Poor bastard,' Runt said. 'I'd charge you out at half a day's wage for a go.'

'Worth that much, am I?'

'More, if you keep smiling like that.'

We were young. Not much else to do, so we fucked on our 1-in-12 off-days, but we were tired most of the time. The Wombats were heavy, awkward, and hard work concentrating to keep them going, sucking at the brains as well as the muscle. More often than not, we saved up all the rooting for our 1-in-7 off-weeks. We'd pack 14 diggers into a couple of 4WDs and cruise into Kalgoorlie's cultural heart. We'd get shitfaced on rum shots in 15 minutes and stagger off in different directions, and meet again in 7 days to head on home.

I tell you what, we'd almost be looking forward to getting back to work. 7 days of debauchery's enough to get anyone desperate for a domestic.

* * *

Unlike Perth, Kalgoorlie had only one damned LED countdown sign, inside Andy's fish and chips shop. Government subsidised, Andy told Runt, the counter was cheaper than a clock so big. Plus, Andy got rebates on his electricity bill for hosting the monstrosity.

As a bonus, the timer was big enough for him to read standing by the fryer, so he'd use the apocalyptic countdown to make sure no one's order fried longer than 15 minutes.

After the storms ripped away the buildings, the extra-wide roads stayed behind, heavy-duty tarmac for the b-triples and road trains. Cracked and broken but there. 30 years later, walking around Kal felt like walking around on a 1:1 scale map of the world.

* * *

Ulawa the professional tattooist and Allison the backyard tattooist had nothing in common except their inks. Ulawa wasn't rich, and Allison wasn't trying to be, so they both lived in the south-eastern branch of the Pit, 6 kilometers away from the centre, which was far. And as far as I knew, they never talked to each other.

They were both instigators during the riots. I never wanted to ask them what they'd wanted. What I wanted to ask was why they did what they did to get it. Except who ever knows why someone gets the urge to glass a whole city in the face?

Even Arunta couldn't answer that question, why the pain got worse than the reason. Ulawa and Allison thought life was bad enough to forget the reasons. I understood thinking it was bad. I spent 7 years starving sanely in the dark while they tried to wreck the Pit and kill us all.

Ulawa died in correctional of an overdose. Allison lived to get out of correctional and found a long-lost brother. They bought a place in Coa-Cannavale and as far as I know, lived happily ever after.

* * *

I only had 1 conversation about the riots.

For a couple of years after Arunta and I got out of the cave-in, we were still sort-of celebrities. Not that it mattered much to our neighbour, Jaysee. He'd been a cop during the riots, and wore a burn scar from those days on half of his face and down his shoulder. The shoulder had been an accident, taken dragging someone out of the flames. The face-scar had been deliberate, a rioter throwing flaming petrol full into his face.

Jaysee told me he didn't hate the rioters, not a bit.

'Naw,' he reckoned, 'can't hate people for doing what they do. People's people, right? And they got the shit while you were away, you can't really judge. You didn't see those freaking landslides - haw, except from the inside! You weren't around when those bugs got into the rain towers. Everyone got really sick and the kiddies, sheesh, it was bad.' He sucked his teeth, contemplative. 'Any kiddies dying where you was stuck?'

'Nah.'

'No one was doing shit-all to fix it, either. If'n I'd not been a cop, I tell you what, I would've been cracking the shits too. That was right before we kicked out the pollies as a bunch of useless twats and put in the new ones. Then the blight--that fucker hit 9 out of 10 of the growing fields. You wouldn't believe the ration lines, mate, you wouldn't. We only got meat every other. You get meat on your side of the cave?'

'Mushrooms.'

'Yeah, it was shit. But shit happens, ay? So they got mad. They were in the poor quarter of the Pit, I would've done the same, I would've been angry. Naw, I don't hate em. Can't hate a flea for biting. Can't hate a bitch for barking.'

Jaysee didn't bear a grudge against Allison, who'd been on the team of rioters who nearly managed to poison 12 of our water towers. He'd forgiven Ulawa for burning away 2 years of crop yield. In Jaysee's mind, they were kids, babies, dumb, innocent angry things who couldn't help themselves.

Jaysee blamed the bosses.

'What bosses?' Runt asked, in a tone of voice.

I should've taken the pint glass out of his hand right then, but I didn't. Can't say I much liked Jaysee anyways.

'Yeah,' Jaysee said. 'If a dumb dog bites, you sue the owner, right?'

Jaysee told us, loud: people who were the rioting kind shouldn't have been brought into the Pit in the first place.

Yeah, right. And who was going to put a value on kinds of people? Who'd draw the line to divide the reactionaries from the lazy bastards? Because Arunta, me and Runt, right, you look at us. Pretend Runt's greys now are sign of great dignity, and this three wisp fu-manchu I've got going is actually the great beard of all worldly wisdom, pretend whatever you want. We weren't ever the kind of people who'd get a first class invitation on a salvation ark to outer space.

Runt tried one last time with Jaysee, saying the people who're the kind to riot are people.

'Not the right kind.' Jaysee closed his mouth and nodded, like he'd gotten so used to shitting out pearls of wisdom that he didn't even wipe his arse any more.

We were only 3 months out of the cave-in. Jaysee had listening issues, and Arunta had issues period. Which didn't really excuse him for glassing Jaysee in the face, but he did, and we dealt.

5 years in lockup, though Arunta only served 3 for good behaviour. 3 years of counseling, through which Runt avoided medicatation and managed on behaviourals. Arunta told Jaysee sorry. Jaysee told Arunta he was an arsehole, and to fuck off. Fortunately, we could, and we moved house.

That's why I don't talk about the riots. I wasn't there.

* * *

Anyway, the riots were history repeating. The same thing happened on a global scale, 2 generations before I was born, when we'd first discovered the Alien.

We had our wars, our riots, and then, we realized we were still going to die. Sitting around waiting for some second miracle to fall out of the skies, the Assembly convened.

Countries threw together a heap of smart people, and a heap of dumb people, and, well, people. There were strategists and overweight mums and anthropologists and philosophers and pornographers, there were dog people and cat people and pigeon fanciers; doctors, and even diggers, though back then we were miners digging for worthless gold.

Everyone got put into a room and told to talk about the end of the world.

The anthropologists got together with the cognitive scientists and the psychologists and made a big cultural simulation program. They wanted to map what would happen if only the smart people were saved, then to map what would happen if a cross-section of human society was saved. So, you know, someone'd be there to make the sandwiches for the smart and worthwhile folk.

This seemed like a good idea, apparently. So our thinkers stood and declared their great plan to everyone else.

'Hold on,' said someone's mother, who probably had a kid like me who knew how to take 6 household items and blow up a schoolhouse with 1 wet match, 'how are you defining smart?'

'Don't get me started on the definition of worthwhile,' said someone's teacher, who probably had a kid like Arunta, who was charisma on long legs and who spend 5 years in correctional for arson, and who should have spent 5 years in correctional for glassing a cop in the face on his front porch.

After years of talking and shouting, the Assembly came out of their room and said to the world, you gotta forget the arks. Forget outside salvation, mateys, unless you think you can cram everyone on board the outgoing ships. If anyone's going to be saved, then everyone's going to be saved. Even the arseholes.

Everyone breathed some kind of collective sigh of relief. Pending the details, we were going to be saved, every last one of us.

Must have been the first time in human history the news wasn't bad.


	3. Chapter 3

Those pending details took decades to work out. Arguing whether to go up or down, in or out, how much it'd cost to keep 2 000 000 000 people and their support infrastructure going through an impact winter. The social connotations of cramped conditions, how would people survive living on top of each other? Culturally speaking, we'd all kill each other outright!

Except we'd been surviving in cramped conditions living on top of each other for millennia. Didn't even involve a new paradigm or a new ruling class or, say, imposing martial law. Commonly speaking, we called this miraculous human survival model 'a city'. 

And money? Just another way of keeping score. Arbitrary, as artificial as a tree in a city. Change the scoring system, and there we go. Wasn't like we'd eat our money.

Our ancestors stopped being mostly stupid and started thinking. 

I didn't know any of this until I was almost 50. School probably taught us, but I wasn't at school, I was still being mostly stupid. Getting drunk, sucking cock and getting tattoos. 

Called myself a free person. Carefree, right? Because I didn't care about the Alien.

Compared to Arunta, who took to the Pit because he cared about the Alien too much, I lived like a cat's furball. Would've told you it didn't matter to me whether I went in or stayed out forever.

Our governments worked out early on they couldn't force people into the Pit, or to contribute their labour or taxes to the Pit. All those years of people fighting for their right to choose, even the Alien shouldn't change that. Those that opted out of survival called themselves free people. No one would hire a free person, house them, feed them or pity them, only mothers their sons. I was 13, what could I say? Easier not caring about the future.

Don't you dare call yourself free, my mum'd shout. Living on the street, I still couldn't get away from her. She'd and my sister Sami hunted me down at least once a week, bringing me food. Free, what a laugh. Never try to convince your own mother you're worthless.

She was the one what conscripted me to the Pit. The government couldn't force us into salvation, but parents were a force no one bothered to document. No early warning systems for parental pride and expectation.

You're not going to find anyone who calls themselves free these days. We know what we owe each other.

* * *

Aldo was the neighbour Arunta and I had a couple of moves after Jaysee. She taught me all the world history school never taught.

Now, our Runt got itchy feet a lot. I think the cave-in did it to him. Even after we got out, we were still living in a cave, just bigger. So we moved every couple of years, easier than cleaning the house, at least. Then, when our first 3 fosters--2 brothers and a sister--grew up and settled into better circumstances, we took in our fourth foster alone and downsized from Coscatta into Tonorthwalk, which was, and always will be, distinct in vibe and superior in class from Epanorthwalk and Copponorthwalk, don't let the property prices fool you.

Aldo was a retired university professor. We swapped a few comments on our front porches where the sunlamps kept the strawberries healthy, and as I grew a bit less rusty at socialising with the intellectuals, she told me stories about how we'd got where we were.

I'd dug the hole Aldo lived in, and I think that impressed her. 8 big bangs and 3 scoops of the grand and worthy Komatsu Wombat, world's greatest digger. 'Part of the incredible human process', she called our holes, 'the turning of miracles into everyday events.' 

Aldo talked to me about this concept of change. I grew up knowing my life would change, and even if I'd been a bit put off by that, I _knew_. Even a cheap shop-bought telescope showed us the Alien's cloud. Life was changing. Surviving meant change.

'No shit,' I'd said. I remember Runt on the step in front of me, reading the newspaper with our foster Cal, who had difficulty with words; on his seventh shade of hair colour this year. Like Arunta said back then, any colour but grey or beige.

'Once upon a time,' Aldo told me, 'people used to detest change. They would say things like: why learn a new operating system, what was wrong with the old one? Why do bank tellers have such an easy job these days, I remember the days when I used to count coins by hand, now there's a machine and they won't even tip your coins in for you! Why do things _this_ way when I've always done them _that_ way? And what they'd especially say,' Aldo shook her head, grinning, 'was this, are you ready?'

I don't want to change, said my ancestors' ancestors. It's hard. 

Fucking hell, I remember thinking. I spent 7 years starving in the dark. So is life.

But they died, and their kids grew up, and their kids did things differently. That's the miracle, right there.

* * *

Aldo died underground, in the arms of her wife Rupert and a paramedic. She was 87 when I moved in next to her, with diabetes what got her in the end. Talk about human-made miracles all she liked, but she wouldn't say no to a cream cheese cake. 

Rupert would bring out half a lethal production for me, Arunta and Cal, sometimes for Finnie and Roma if they were visiting. Slapping Aldo's hand away from the plate was useless; Aldo had a glare like the Alien itself.

'Fine! You'll kill yourself!'

'I thank our ancestors I have the right to choose how I'll die!'

'Then have your cake and eat it,' Rupert stormed off in a sulk. 'Death by cheesecake! Shakespeare would have written this as a farce!'

* * *

1 argument against using the Pit as our salvation: people weren't born to live in a hole.

People were born to live, though. The how was subject to change without notice. And we'd _had_ notice.

Growing up, the Alien had been there long enough for me to dislike the sky. Used to be a chant, too: coming from above, to fuck us around, don't look up, look down!

By the time my mother signed me on as a digger, I took the job partly because it would take me below ground. Away from that sky, away from the 100s of countdown signs through the CBD.

Each area of the world negotiated its own, most likely solution, but Australasia was flat as cordial. Our only choice was to go down. Japan and Indonesia would be accommodated on our mainland too, because their whole landmass was going to go under, and we had the land to spare. The Kalgoorlie Pit was one of many, not even the largest. Felt a bit flat calling it the SuperPit, when Boddington's Pit was twice the size. Tokyo Pit would do your head in.

2 generations before I was born, Australia became Australasia Pacific. 1 generation before I was born, the name only mattered if you were trying to tell a bad joke.

Once, soon after we'd first got together, Arunta asked me what I thought about the fact that if we'd met 200 years ago, we probably would have tried to kill each other.

'What do you mean?'

'You know, ancestry. Our ancestors would have killed each other.'

After a minute, I said, 'Which ones?'

'All of them, Katashi. The Russians and the Japanese and the Indigenous and the Indonesians, the Australians, the British and the--'

He counted on his hands. He'd run out of fingers before he'd run out of ancestors.

'But they didn't kill each other, because otherwise we wouldn't be here.'

'Fuck you and your paradox,' Arunta said.

'Is that an offer, or an argument?'

'Reckon it's both.'

'Kinky.'

* * *

About 6 months after he'd arrived at the Pit, before we'd hooked up, I asked Arunta what he did with himself before coming to dig holes.

We were in the mess, morning shift, and Arunta was burned raw across the nose and cheeks from an inadvertent walkabout he'd taken yesterday. He never learned about putting on his sunblock.

'Barista,' Arunta said, stiff for the crackle of his lips, which looked kind of like he'd been eating popcorn and failing. The sort of burn we'd got used to seeing: antimelanoma shots were as good as B12 supps, those days when we still had a sky.

Barista didn't surprise me. True as blue Arunta made the best coffee for mornings after. Every birthday, football final or wedding night, the supe gave him the day after off so he'd happily brew the best coffee in the world, hand ground beans, would you believe, which made everyone nice and human.

'You?' Arunta had a way of framing things, real deliberate with the shape of his lips. He made himself bleed shaping the 'o'.

'Nah, mate, I was born a digger. Never wanted to do or be anything else. Life comes as it comes.'

'Pay's pretty good. I keep checking my bank and getting real happy, right up until I remember there's nothing here to buy. When I get back up after the shitstorm dies down, and - and we switch back on the economy, however the fuck we're going to do that, I'm going to buy me 1 of those manor houses down in Peppy Grove and have parties full of 16 year olds with really taut abs and no shirts. And volleyball. Beach volleyball. In mud.'

'Hate to tell you this, Runt, there ain't going to be a Peppy Grove when we get out, and you're probably going to be 102.'

'So I'll buy a big piece of toast and call him Peppy Grove.' Arunta tapped my beer with his. '102 isn't too old to get laid. Plus, ain't you ever heard of savior quotient?'

'Sure have. What got you the black eye you had when you got here.'

'Well, fuck me,' Arunta said. 'So you were paying attention. How many more hints do I have to bloody give you?'

That was when I gave him a Clancy.

Now this is a historical action the likes of which will never be repeated, so pay attention. Clancy of the Overflow was a poem from way before the Alien had made itself known, Australian before Australasia ever existed as a glimmer in a politician's eye. Damned if I read the poem, some old ranger who lived out by a lake, or a waterfall, but the poem gave the act its name.

What a Clancy involved was this:

1\. I lift my beer.   
2\. While Runt's busy grinning at me, I crack the bottom of my beer on top of his.   
3\. His beer, the liquid part, being hit by vibrating glass on every side, fizzes up like mad.   
4\. His beer comes out all over his hand, the overflow giving him what is generally known as a Clancy. 

Quick as a flash Runt slapped his palm over the mouth of his bottle, which stopped white froth spurting out the sides, and in the slickest save I had ever seen, he took away his hand and sealed his lips tight around the bottleneck. Cheeks hollowed, sucking and swallowing even with those split lips, Arunta Williams did not spill a drop.

That was probably enough of a hint, I thought. As if me stalking him for the last 6 months hadn't been enough.

After the Clancy died down, Arunta tipped the beer back - hands free, the fucker - and swallowed the last of it. He had a thick neck for such a fine looking kid, or maybe he was a fine looking kid because he had a thick neck. I watched his throat move.

'Would you like to fuck me blind?' 

'I would fucking love to,' he said. 'Let me finish this off.'

I probably should have said nothing, or ignored him, or moved on. I didn't really do casual, and Arunta looked like he did casual like a casual thing to do. 

Lucky I didn't say no.


	4. Chapter 4

About 2 months after the Pit's cover went on, the new city's lights powered up on us diggers, the wind blowing, the rain towers raining.

We took time-lapse shots of the first seedlings sprouting. We even had baby orchards, dwarfed bushes specially made for the caves, all to ourselves before Perth started moving in. No trees, though, but I couldn't miss what I'd never known.

The Pit itself kept its original form, a huge winding terrace, cut through with new stairs and mechanical lifts to help people getting up and down. In the middle, the public works, the hospitals, offices, manufacturing plants, the schools, the swimming pools jammed into a 6 kilometer square space -- you know, you live there now. Everything you'd find in a CBD.

0.5 kilometres of depth gave enough of a sensation of space and sky to help even the most claustrophobic breathe easier. The tunnels were packed with houses, each suburb with its own small set of commercial pods to provide the needed local food and facilities. Out in the Pit, we'd hang out in pools and recreate, looking up at the sky technology provided.

Pure air and airflow was a problem, solved by people smarter than me. Water was a problem, and people smarter than me worked that out, too. The water was the fun bit: the 36 vertical shafts down which water rained constantly. No matter where you lived, you'd walk to a shaft and have a sit down and think, listening to the sound of the rain.

With a lot less space than before, and no real sunshine, we lived on staggered times so we wouldn't overload our services. Coscatta's 8am was Toveast's 12pm. The Pit's centre stayed busy and never got too crowded out. None of us had cars, either, though we got pushies as a gift from the government, and the oldies got electric gophers. The cops, ambos, firefighters and emergency services were the only ones who had motorbikes. Took a dedicated suicide like Aldo to stay fat.

The growing fields were amazing. The kids'd hang out between rows at all hours, stripped off and getting their tans.

* * *

The move happened just before the Alien hit, 6 solid months of coordinated migration. The cover wasn't sealed shut until the storms got bad enough to poison the air. I was 24 when the Pit migration began. I had my job, serving maintenance crew and occasionally expansion, but us diggers didn't have a barracks any more, a mess hall, nothing. Our pay went back to grunt rates, but there you go. Money down here seemed imaginary anyways, a way people could keep a track of themselves.

Right when our barracks closed down, Runt and I realised we didn't have a house. We moved in with my mother, blissfully happy with the circumstance, even though she cursed us constantly and kept shrinking Arunta's jeans in hot water washes. She and my sister Sami used to run a knickknacks shop in the CBD - the old CBD, the surface one - but based solely on imports what weren't possible any more. Still, for every opportunity lost we'd made sure of another way for people to live. With the in-kind value of their old shop, she and Sami bought and ran their suburb's laundromat.

'Makes it all the more strange why she keeps shrinking my jeans,' Runt said to me once. 'Why's she never shrinking yours or Sami's?'

'Because we're her children, dumbarse. You're the freeloader drinking her beer. You don't even leave money on the fridge.'

'I think she does it because she likes me.'

'I like you.'

'Good to know,' Runt said. 'Because otherwise this whole thing we've got going would be really weird.'

* * *

We were on my mum's sofa at the critical-hit moment, the beginning of the weeks of violent tidal waves and earthquakes and steaming heated fury and the toxic stormy crap the scientists told us would be going on up above. After all those countdowns, we'd forgotten the scheduled date. Maybe teachers got schoolkids to stop and record the historic nothing of the end of the world with silence, but for us it came as a bit of an anti-climax.

We were shagging. The sofa kept making this crunching noise, until Runt reached under his back, dug through the pillows and pulled out the problem: an old bag of potato chips.

He ate them. Lying on his back had never gotten in the way of his ability to swallow.

'Your mother's right, you're a fucking pig, and these are stale.'

'If I'm a pig, you're a pigfucker. And who's eating stale chips with what fingers which were just where?'

'Who shoved a half-eaten bag of potato chips-' Arunta checked '-coded from before the migration, and why am I not surprised, behind a sofa cushion?'

'Fair call. Who's going to come over those cushions in 20 seconds?'

'20 seconds,' he snorted into dated BBQ, and decided to wipe his fingers on the sofa, 'flattering yourself, much?'

Feeling guilty about wrecking the couch, no mention of what we kept doing in Mum's shower, I said, 'I think we should get a place of our own.'

'Bloody oath we should,' Runt said. 'Now I'm hungry. I want strawberries. Maybe we should quit digging and become fruit pickers instead, that way we'd get awesome tans. Fruit picking shirtless in sunlamps all day long. All that's missing is the volleyball.'

'You mind much if we finish off here first?'

'So much for it all being over in 20 seconds,' Arunta said, 'you and your promises.'

Cleaning up afterwards, I'd realised the significance of the date thanks to the old packet of potato chips. The wrapper advertised an End of the World draw with the date in red, just like the LED counters neither of us missed.

1 time in the history of the world when I could've used the 'so, lover, did the earth move for you, too?' line.

Ok. Still would've been cheesy. To err is human, to try again, divine?

* * *

Arunta and I never got the hang of cleaning up after ourselves. Not until we got kids, anyway, but the kids came years after the Alien hit. Our first year of living alone and together in the Pit, we thought we got hit with a plague of rats.

They were everywhere, like anchovies on pizza. We'd be trying to watch the screen and they'd run across the front. Leave out one paltry packet of potato chips and they'd be rustling all night long. Bread would have mouse-tunnels chewed through. We'd head out to work in the morning and see them running across the road in front of us, lit up silver in the morning lowlights.

'It's because we're crammed in here with no room to move,' said the first pest controller I called. He hated rats personally, learned all their names and small minded ways, that's how much he hated them. 'There's going to be another black plague, you wait and see! Someone's gotta do something about this!'

Meanwhile we wanted him to do something about it, like bait and kill the rats in our house, but after about 3 months they came back. The second pest controller, the one Runt called, was a little more laid back. He took 1 look at our kitchen, 2 looks inside our grill, and said,

'Either get a live-in dishwasher or start eating out.'

'This mouse plague must be giving you a lot of business,' I tried.

He gave me a look, a lot like the looks Sami used to give me. 'You been listening to the shock-awe newsies, have you? Listen, I've been in this business for 20 years, and I can tell you there ain't no mouse plague. There's the same number of rodents from before, just like they organized their own little mouse migration, packing bloody mouse-sized suitcases. So maybe people see them more often, what with less space, but hell, this isn't a plague.' He pointed at our kitchen. 'That's the bloody abomination.'

'Told you you're disgusting,' Runt said.

So I came late to home living, what could I do?

'At least it wasn't cockroaches,' Arunta said. 'Or flies. Fuck, at least not flies!'

* * *

The fly plague was a true-blue documented plague, happening in the year Runt started working at the Pit.

The flies were everywhere. They flew in from the desert, they blew in from across the ocean, crawling even into the deepest parts of the Pit itself, inside the Komatsu Wombats, driving everyone mad. They could find the tiniest gap in our interface and get in, and the first we'd know of it was the bite at our eyes. They'd cluster in links of 2 and 3 and 4, feeding off each other and feeding off any wet they'd found.

Fly traps, fly paper and fly spray, nothing worked. We'd wake up and find them stuck in the corners of our eyes, little bloody berries to pick off and swear at. Runt had a hard time. Didn't matter how hot it was, he'd sleep with the sheet tucked up tight over his head.

The next year, the flies were dead. The change had killed them, or maybe the lack of anything else living to feed on.

* * *

When we were diggers and the whole Pit was ours, sometimes instead of going into Kal on leave we'd head out further, into the flatlands where all the flies had gone to die, just salt, red dust and chasms. We could find pockets of something hardy surviving, greyish green in the shade of a split rock. We'd set up camp, then go ripping up the landscape for something else to do. If really tanked, or in Runt's case, really strung, we'd hang on the back of the 4WD and get the driver to do their worst. Landscape-surfing, so to speak. We lost 2 4WDs, 1 falling 13 meters down a gully, the other rolling into another. We were tougher than those old runabouts, the worst we ever got were bruises.

The wind blasted so bad we slept in the back of, the front of and under the 4WDs.

Those days, I thought I was being subtle, stalking Arunta. He topped me for sure on the subtlety ranks. In the middle of the night, he'd wait til I got up to take a slash, then he'd crawl into the back of whatever 4WD I'd been in. He'd lie as still as he could. I'd be back in my swag, stretched out and almost snoring again when he'd moan or sigh or yawn.

I'd wake up right up then, eyes wide, heart hammering. Even a yawn or a sigh came branded 'Arunta'. I'd never be able to get back to sleep, not imagining what it'd feel like if I rolled on top of him in the dark, pretending like I was drunk enough not to notice. Come morning we'd slink out, shirtless and hard, me looking like I hadn't slept, because I hadn't, and Runt looking as smug as he always did, the bastard.

We were so sneaky we outsnuck each other. We must've slept together for months before we slept together.

On a night out like that, when the winds were less than lethal, Runt asked me, 'You got any idea what you want to do when we come out?'

'When we do what?'

'When we come out of the hole, dipshit. After.' He pointed up at the sky. 'After the Alien fucker writes itself off playing chicken with our big mother of an earth.'

Everyone stared at him, or their drinks, or the lantern, wherever we'd been staring before he'd spoken.

'I'm buying a farm,' Mel said. 'S'gotta be money in food, after all that shit dies down. Vital industries.'

Selphira, the geologist for our team, said something about starting a private enterprise in the Pit, because she wasn't going to be a digger forever. Mitchell had something else to say about wanting to retire to the beach; Callie and Saul were thinking about flying to Europe, they'd never had a chance to see the great old cities.

'Won't be any cities,' Runt said.

'Sure will,' Saul said. 'Paree's digging in crossways along the Seine River faultline, we'll go check that out. And Venezia, shit, Runt, Venezia's been so reinforced to stop the fucker sinking I wouldn't be surprised if it popped to the surface again after the storms, like a cork.'

Runt punched my shoulder. 'Katashi ain't ever been silent so long. Thinking deep?'

'I'm going river fishing,' I said. 'Under trees. S'the only two things we're not going to have in the hole, rivers and trees. And cows, but cows don't pull my chain. How about you?'

Runt thought carefully, then said, 'I'm thinking about learning double bass.'

We laughed at him.

'Sweetie,' Callie said, 'we're going to be in the hole 30 years or summat, you can learn double bass.'

'Nah,' Runt said, 'can't have real jazz without a sky.'

The conversation came real easy, like we were talking about our retirements. We weren't desperate like those dying flies, our last crazy buzz before we dropped.

That kind of crazy talk came a lot later, 6 years into the cave-in.


	5. Chapter 5

I never knew how terrified Runt was of the Pit. He became a digger because he needed to know how this lifesaver worked. He couldn't trust a thing unless he'd been a part.

Funny thing to think, because we'd all been a part. The Pit's our city. Can't live without it, can't live without being a part of it.

* * *

You've noticed I have a multipurpose 'we'.

I say we, and I mean the unit Arunta and I make. I say we, and I mean my family, my mum, Runt, the kids. I mean, we diggers, or even, we 300, who lived through the cave-in.

I mean we, Australasia Pacific, I mean we, the world.

I mean we, all of us, all at once. 'Them' and 'us' lived before my time, well before yours. The last 'they' had been the Assembly, people taken out of the great big world of all of us and told to decide our fates. They decided being a 'them' and an 'us' sucked.

We're not so bad. We survived the worst. Even survived the cave-in.

My mum, now, survived the end of the world's ending. She was 97, and died 4 years later, typical for her generation. Doctors tell me I will live to 120, nearly, long enough to see the end of the world's latest beginning. 

The end of the end of the world, exactly like the beginning of the end, proved another kind of anti-climax.

* * *

30 years after the Alien hit, everyday life up above became a good idea again. I say everyday, because assorted industries worked up above almost since the immediate firestorm died down. Storms, even toxic storms and acid rain, are full of energy and chemicals, stuff for a canny scientist to harvest like apples and oranges.

The real end of the end was announced over the screens.

The cover stayed, too damned useful to get rid of, distilling out the toxins, collecting water, recycling our own. The weather wasn't too stable, either, and the cover kept our temperature even. The blast gates were unlocked and wouldn't be locked again. Everyone was free to do what we wanted to do, up above or down below, with associated warnings: the water level risen, take sunscreen, take pure water, take goggles and don't get lost; mind the weather, and the children who hadn't seen outside before, be kind to each other and thank our bloody ancestors.

Runt and I waited with Mum until the first rush of eager people stopped choking the exits. She listened to the screen message over and over. I don't think she believed us. She told me her great great grandmother hadn't believed the moon landing either. The old ancestor of mine thought the landing was a lie, a joke, scoffing in the face of anyone who tried to convince her we'd landed on the moon.

Once we got up there, something like salt covered Kal's red earth, white as snow. The air was hot, almost as hot as now, ready to drop to below-freezing every night. The weather forecast for the next 30 years was for sporadic cyclonic rainstorms, 80% humidity and wind, wind, wind. The transport dropped us off about 0.5 kilometers from the new beach.

Now me, I'd managed to dislocate my knee 3 weeks prior doing something middle-aged people shouldn't have been doing, which had Runt laughing at me for days. I made the 0.5 kilometer walk on crutches.

Mum gave out after 100 meters. I went on for a bit, not noticing, but Runt whacked my shoulder for a head's-up. He jogged back to her.

'Ma,' he bawled out, 'come on!'

The sight of her left me poleaxed. Tiny in her batik pantsuit, fly-eyed with the goggles and her big bun of hair. She looked like she was shaking, but that could've been the wind tugging at her clothes. I didn't know when she'd gotten so thin.

Runt went back to her, picked her up and carried her onwards. I would have told him middle-aged people shouldn't be going around picking up strange women, he'd end with a dislocated knee if he wasn't careful, but Mum was making my protest for me. She beat Arunta around the ears with her handbag, whacking him every few seconds shouting, 'Donkey!'

'Check it out, I think your ma's trying to tell me something. Either that or she wants me to go faster.'

'Turn right,' I said, 'I think she means? She's going at your right ear? Is her weight leaning to the left?'

'Is this another one of your sick games? Some allusion you think I'm too old and too stupid to understand? I give up, you boys, I give up! I tried and tried with you, but look at you both, great big stupid giants, I can't believe you lived to make your mother weep!'

Then she shut up because we'd made it over the crest.

We stared at the ocean. She started crying, clutching at Runt's arms. 

'I can't believe you lived to make your mother weep,' she said, and this time it sounded like praise.

Runt took off his goggles, still a dumbarse, swearing at the pain. 'Ain't that something.' 

Then he cradled my mother like a baby, walked unsteadily down to the mild little waves and swore he'd toss her in.

* * *

It hadn't ever been our world up there. For Runt and for me, seeing it again was like looking at heritage, honouring our ancestors' shrine. Our lives were in the Pit.

We'd been through 6 foster kids by then, grown up, settled in with other families, or moved on, hopefully the better for having known us both. When the screens announced the date the blast gates would be opening, I popped round to see the 6 of them, even on crutches. I wanted to make sure they'd make the effort to have a look.

Finiel our first, I found last. Fin'd always been looking for a way to escape the Pit. He'd been born down here, so his fear of living here never made sense to me. 

After I found Fin, I sat with him in hospital for 2 hours, holding his hand and telling him stories of blue skies, looking for the flicker of his lids. I'll be honest. The telling took the heart out of me. Some things are hard to do even for a talker like me.

'Well?' Runt asked when I got back.

'Maybe we'll see them up there, maybe not. Can't pressure people into things, you know. Rue's got all her brood, you know, takes her half a day to get them marshaled, and you know what Cal's like with promises, and Fin-- Yeah, well. Fin.'

'Lazy good for nothing buggers,' Runt said, mildly. 'Let's take Mum instead.'

* * *

No one from those early days, when the Pit was for diggers and dreaming, would have guessed we'd keep on.

It was hard for me, living alone those first 5 years on the Pit, trying to grow up. One of the youngest, the youngest in my field, and me who never shut up. I even talk in my sleep, Runt told me. 

He didn't tell me when we started together. I'd wake up and find him staring at me with this hollow look on his face, cheeks sucked in, like he wasn't sure whether he wanted to run or eat me. Eat me, it turned out, in great hungry swallows of exactly how much I gave.

Before I met Arunta, I'd done other longtermers in Perth, but I'd been a kid then, handjobs in corners with the homeless. A few times out on the Pit, I sucked cock for the mind-fodder, not for the men.

Kalgoorlie made it easy to be alone. Always a miner's town, full of excuses: knotholes and glory holes and all sorts of wanking fodder. Back in my bunk, I'd be jerking off with quick strokes remembering myself on my knees, the thick taste in my mouth. I didn't jerk off like that when I did the sucking. I'd do it slow and hard, like I wanted to snap my dick, and when I came it'd shoot halfway across whatever back room we were in. Hard to remember the desperation now. 'Give it to me,' I'd say. The other guy would come in his hand and flick it at me. I'd lick it, too, off wooden floorboards, eyes shut tight. I can still feel the grain on my tongue.

Can you believe I haven't seen wooden floorboards in decades? No trees!

The first time I'd sucked Runt off, I couldn't get over how he kept looking at me, and I kept looking at him, like the eyes were more important than everything else. Maybe they were, we'd be wearing goggles outside and our interface at work, the only time we'd see each other's eyes where when we got naked.

I wanted to make him come so badly. It struck me, everything and everyone before him had been mind-fodder for me only. Treating people like wanking machines, that's what I'd been doing. This was -- this is different. Arunta's whole face, his whole body turned thin with hunger when I'd suck him, moaning like he'd never been sucked before. He'd pull out and polite as you can imagine, he'd come on my lips so he could kiss it off me.

Sex stopped being selfish.

And he was kinky, Runt, kinky as easy as breathing. Didn't need to drink or be desperate. Nothing strange to pull a belt tight around his throat and ask me to pull his arse wide and wet on him. Next day out we'd be jogging our track and checking to see if we could better our time from yesterday, or getting food, or visiting the kids.

2 500 000 people, and what were the odds?

* * *

Sometime after we got out of the cave-in, Arunta forgot that we were living in a hole. Almost as soon as he'd let it go, he went and did something right quick to put himself back into another kind of hole, locked doors and everything, by glassing Jaysee in the face.

I couldn't visit Arunta in correctional. Not the way we needed to see each other. That was the most unfairness in my life. Allison got conjugal rights with people she never married, like Jaysee, who met Allison by handwritten letter and who good-graciously decided not to hate rioters like the poor one he screwed. Not me, not Arunta. Face time only.

I thought Runt would die in there. 2.1 meters of 38 year old digger's muscle, and I thought he'd die in there. Stupid, huh? Only a 5 year sentence.

5 years was only 16% of the time we would spend bottled up in this great hole of ours. But 71% of the time we'd spent trapped behind a cave-in.


	6. Chapter 6

My sister Sami got married soon after we 300 got out of the cave-in. Unlike my mother, Sami didn't survive to see us ride out the Alien's storms. She died 4 months after her husband broke her neck. The hospital didn't have the resources to keep her alive.

It was plain bad timing, Sami having a broken neck while we were living in the Pit. Before, we would have flown Sami to a specialist or flown in specialist equipment. During the storm? Impossible. Now? Sure, no problem.

I don't know what I'm saying sometimes. Timing wasn't the real problem. The problem was, Sami shacked up with the person who would kill her. She met him through Arunta and me. The murderer was a pro football player. She'd met him at a fancy party the newsies threw for us 300 survivors, where Runt brought my mum as his date, and I brought Sami as mine.

For a while, it was us survivors and the newsgroups holding the city together. The riots were as recent as yesterday's nightmare, and out into cesspit the 300 of us came out, having survived 7 years of the worst with nothing more than bad haircuts and a grudge against mushrooms. Everyone wanted to know, how did we do it? How did we spend those 7 years living in the dark and not killing each other?

So the newsies told our stories. For morale, one newsgroup organised a quick-up league between our 300's best and the local teams. Runt played ruck rover again, I took full forward, and it felt like we were back in the Pit when it'd been just us diggers, our Wombats and a Pit not Super.

The other team's captain, who was the murderer Sami married, came into our change rooms after the game. He shook everyone's hands. 'That was a great game, guys,' he'd said, earnest, looking everyone in the eyes. 'You're all absolute champions. You're all my heroes.'

* * *

When Arunta found out he would be going back to correctional, only a couple of months after Sami died, he told his psych officer: 'You put me in the same facility as that murdering arsehole, I don't know if I want to stop myself from glassing him either.'

'Why would you want to do that, Arunta?'

'He threw my sister off the side of the Pit.'

'You don't have a sister, Arunta.'

Arunta said, 'That bastard threw my sister _in law_ off the side of the Pit. She landed on top of the rec centre, did you know that? There were kids inside! Katashi went mad and for 4 weeks, he didn't say a fucking word. You don't understand it, he never shuts up. He talks in his sleep, he likes talking so much. For 4 weeks, I had no idea what was wrong. I thought I'd done something. I didn't know what to do. And Katashi still won't talk about his sister, he still won't talk about the cave-in, I only knew what had happened to Sami when Ma - my mother in law - had to break down and tell me. You are not putting me in the same place as this guy!'

'You're not married, Arunta.'

And Runt said, 'I spent 7 years living in the dark with him, you try to tell me we're not family again in that tone of voice, and I don't know if I'll want to stop myself from doing what I want to do to you. Why do I need a reason to want to stay away from murdering arseholes?'

'Maybe everyone in prison is a murdering arsehole,' said the officer. 'Maybe everyone in this city is a murdering arsehole, you can't tell, Arunta, until it happens. How do you think you're going to cope?'

Runt said, 'Look at my hands shaking, genius. I'm not going to cope.'

The psych's name was Unique Yeboah. Until the day Unique died, Arunta would mail him the cheapest, nasty cask of wine he found every New Year. Unique must've had a sense of humour, because he'd always send Arunta a Get Well Soon card in return.

Unique said, 'Listen to me carefully, Arunta Williams, do what I tell you to do, and we will get you out as quickly as we can.'

If there was anything Runt backed, it was his own salvation.

After the 3 years of anger management finished, Runt told me over dinner: 'All I was saying was, I didn't want to be living next to a dickhead neighbour again. Out here I've got a choice.'

'You don't sound like you've changed.'

Runt grinned around his tea. 'It's all superficial strategies. Gotta strategise to preserve the core miracle of my sweet-arse insanity, right?'

'Thanks be for small mercies.'

* * *

While Arunta was in correctional, the storms outside let up enough that some of us went back outside.

The storms started when the Alien's hit ignited the forests. From that, the cities went up in smoke, and the toxic product involved in cities went up in multicolour flame. Scientists speculated it'd take years for that to die down, not to mention the UV and the radiation. About the 14-year mark, it was bearable enough that we risked it. We needed to get outside and fix the slow failures happening across the cover.

I would be going up with other diggers, this latest generation of Komatsu Wombats. 150 other workers would be out and up too, fixing windpods and sensors and the kinds of things I knew nothing about.

Every 2 years, a group of us went to tidy things up. By the time Runt got out of correctional, I'd found a way to wangle him a pass too.

Apparently, we just had to ask.

* * *

The world up there was a jar full of muddy water, and someone kept shaking it up so the mud couldn't settle.

We worked as quickly as we could. We only came out in a lull, with no way to predict how long they'd last. By the time we finished, the walls of dirt would be getting agitated.

Driving back to the Pit, racing, even, Arunta pulled on his oxy mask before I could ask what he was doing, sealed it shut and kicked opened the 4WD door. 10 to a car, we screamed at him, too busy with our own masks to grab for him. 'Keep driving!' he hollered, because the swerving of the panicked driver was nearly knocking him off. 'Go on, straight! Follow it home!'

Arunta hauled himself up the side of the 4WD, clung to the roof racks and arched up into the sky as the chemical storm broke behind him. Mad, mad fucker, he still wears the acid burns on his shoulders.

The woman in the middle slammed Arunta's door shut. I wound down my window, lifted myself out to sit on the edge so I could see Arunta, and clung for my life to the door frame. He was laughing, crazy bastard, pointing. I followed his finger.

The storm was spinning up a cyclone, a funnel black like paint against the nothing grey. At the very top, where the vortex was sucking up the dirt clouds, were streaks of vivid blue.

* * *

The only other time I'd ever seen Runt so happy-stupid was when we got out of the cave-in and went back to our house. I had the key in my pocket. I'd had the same bloody key in my pocket for 7 years. It didn't even squeak when I turned the lock.

Mum was sitting inside, wearing a pantsuit she must've spent the last 6 years sewing with the tackiest, most godawful cockatoo and rabbit pattern I'd ever seen in my life. She howled murder the second she saw us, a bawl going straight to my guts and pressing buttons I never knew I had. I froze. Runt went straight to her, wrapped her up in his arms and rocked her.

'You're both so thin! Nothing I bought will fit you! I bought you jumpers! I even bought you jeans! Do you know how hard it is to size for your stupid height, I had so many hems taken down! And you know how much I hate working with denim, it's a horrible working class material fit only for the poor and the rock stars!'

Runt said, 'No worries, Ma, we can get fat again, promise.'

She grabbed two fistfuls of his hair and worked him side to side, and kissed him on the forehead and the lips, and she shouted, 'I got you strawberries!'

Runt said, 'Course you did, Ma, because you know they're my favourite fruit.'

Sami said, ''Cept maybe for the big lout standing at the door looking like a structural support?'

'Too right,' Runt said. 'More of a vegetable right now, look at that blank stare on him.'

'And I sewed you rabbits!' my mum howled. '1 for every month you were away! Because you screw like bunnies!'

Sami said, 'You guys probably shouldn't ask what the cockatoos were for.'

'You're a sick-minded pervert, Ma,' Runt said, and squeezed her through her sobs.

She said, 'I know! That's why you love my son!'

He said, and damned if he wasn't shaking too, like they were contagious, 'My god, I love you and your son.'

'Sheesh,' Sami said, who had come up to my side by then. 'And they reckon people end up finding partners exactly like their parents. Where's that idea come from, you reckon?'

'Hey, big 'un. Good to see you.'

'Hey, bro. Yeah, likewise. Working a bit of overtime these days, eh?'

'The first 4 years weren't too bad, the last 3 dragged on forever.'

Sami pulled a tissue out from her sleeve. 'Something in your eye, little brother?'

'Cave-dust.'

'Course it is. You idiot.'

I don't want to talk about the cave-in, except if I don't, you'd think something bad and horrible and unspeakable happened.

It wasn't like that at all.


	7. Chapter 7

A lower suburb was unstable. Dirt falling through cracks in the ceiling, some of the reinforcements moving beyond safe deformation points. A house crumbled. Geologists were in there, testing things with vibrating probes, convinced nothing would fall for another 10 years.

The cave-in didn't happen there. The cave-in happened in the area where we diggers were working to make a new suburb, seeing as the old 1 was falling apart. The process was fast-tracked, which meant as us diggers were starting on the last street, the interior designers were hanging the final curtains in the first street's houses, and turning on the porch lights for welcome.

We'd about finished the digging part when the entire side of the stratum fell on top of us.

* * *

On the dark side of the fall, there were:  
5 hydraulic engineers  
13 plumbers  
3 structural engineers  
9 civil engineers  
1 doctor and 3 paramedics, who were treating one of the diggers for heat exhaustion  
19 ironworkers  
7 demolition experts  
3 pest controllers, because the rats and cockroaches had followed us down  
4 project managers, one of whom was visiting  
the quantity surveyor  
14 painters  
1 network administrator, who was working at the worksite's communications hub because it was glitchy  
9 cabinetmakers  
2 construction managers  
55 concreters and surface treatment workers  
12 electricians  
3 council members  
5 building surveyors checking standards  
130 of us diggers  
an architect

I know this, and 300 names, because we spent years in the dark together not dying. But if we had died and been dug up years later, we'd be a perfect fossilised example of an on-site partnered contract construction team.

The dark didn't come until the third day, when the air was getting tight. The small houses and smaller streets were painful to be in, psychologically or what, so the 300 of us were sitting in the new suburb's commercial street, which had higher ceilings and more lights.

The lights were browning out. The network administrator shifted her gear into the communications hub, trying to use those fresh-installed data lines to get into contact with the outside. The fall had crushed the site office. Arunta had been working nearest to the fall and raced his Wombat over, digging out the shipping container, the computers and Kyr, the network administrator.

Everyone argued over Kyr's head about what to do when she stood up, and just waited for silence. She was a patient person, the most patient person I had ever met. Give her any problem, and she wouldn't try to solve it. She'd think about it for as long as it needed, and then she'd just bloody well fix it. Trying just wasn't a part of the game. 

'I have contact,' Kyr said. 'HQ's getting someone from CoP who knows what's happening. They've been talking about us out there.'

She didn't say: they've been working out a way to get you out. Which was good, because we might've cheered, and there's nothing worse than misplaced cheer.

Because they couldn't dig us out. Not yet.

That was ok, Kyr typed. We can wait, we can turn off the lights and lie down and meditate, or something, there's probably air for another couple of days.

Uh, yeah, said CoP. Then there's the other problem.

Turned out the undetected fault dropping the Pit's face was directly above our point of access. We practically were the fault. The depth of the blockage was so shallow a Wombat could fart it clear in about 4 days, but the action would trigger a larger fall really fucking things up below. If they were going to dig us out, they'd bulwark the entire side of the Pit face to do it.

You'd have to do that anyway, Kyr said. So do it.

Yeah, said CoP, no arguments there. It's how long it's going to take. 10 years long.

Of course, they weren't telling us everything. 7 years later, when we got out, we saw the damage from the fall. They under-exaggerated how big the fall was, and over-exaggerated how long it'd take them to fix it. They didn't want to get out hopes up or down.

Kyr didn't say, 10 years, you fuckers? Which is probably what Arunta would have said.

What Kyr did, real patiently, because we had time: she talked to the construction manager, then a few of the others, then sat down and thought. She eventually typed back: we have houses, streets, shelters. Thanks to the fast-tracking, we have various supplies, for example, every household's very important emergency rations. We can dig access to a rain tower, surely. The growing fields have been installed, too, hydraulics finished off today. Air is going to be the problem.

And electricity, CoP said, because at the moment the cables you're using are damaged, and bleeding into a large segment of the ground. This is not sustainable. The damage is in an area we can't reach to fix. We have to cut you off. Goodbye to your growing fields.

How bad is the leak? Kyr asked.

2/3 of us out here are browned out to keep you live and running.

Kyr spoke to a couple of diggers, then went back to the console and said, 1/2 of the Komatsu Wombats are fitted with backup generators, and we've fuel for power, if we had air. Can you send me a 3D schematic of the areas around us? The air shafts here have already been installed, we need to connect them to a duct going to the windpods above.

Uh, yeah, said CoP. They sent the slowest email in the world, which was slow because they got their geotechs to mark on the map exactly where we would have to dig to reach that blessed airshaft without triggering the fatal fall outside.

A worm couldn't have squeezed through some of those tolerances.

* * *

Kyr called me over then, because I was the diggers' supe. She showed me the schematic on screen. 'You got anyone who can dig this in 3 days, probably while half-dead from anoxia?'

I didn't know what was going on. I recognised the air shaft, and that it wasn't the exterior, and I said, 'I do, but why don't we dig out instead?'

Kyr showed me the email where CoP had told us how and why, under no circumstances whatsoever, was anyone to even hiccup near the fall, and certainly not a Komatsu Wombat.

I would not have believed how good a breath of fresh air made me feel. Trees are nice, but air is everything.

* * *

Kyr let CoP know we'd tapped the air flow. CoP said, 'See you in 10 years, best of luck,' and cut our power.

Only then, in the dark, did Kyr explain our circumstances. She did what HQ had done, though she hadn't known they'd done it, and told us 12 years.

Of course we panicked. She let us, too. There wasn't much else to do in the dark.

We spent 5 days not believing. Then we spent 5 days going mad in the dark, wasting the lights and the fuel on the Komatsu Wombats, breaking into the houses and emergency stores we'd just finished stocking up, and hoarding the rations within. We claimed houses, claimed allies, made enemies and claimed food, and did it very politely, mostly by not talking to each other.

Kyr talked to us, 1 at a time. She got paper, sat with a hand-made hurricane lamp in the corner, and made lists. She sat down with the engineers and worked out how many hours of light we had, how many hours of power for the sunlamps, which would grow our food. There were dry rations, sure, but no one wanted to live on those for 12 years running.

When she had it worked out, she talked to us in groups of 3, then told us to go and talk to other groups of 3 until everyone knew what we could do. It took another 3 days of argument before unanimous accord was reached. We did it in torchlight, in broken light, occasionally in floodlights, because we couldn't decide what would waste more of our fuel.

* * *

This was what we did to survive:

For 1 hour every day for 12 years, we would have low light, for tasks and for sanity. For 2 hours every day for 12 years, the growing fields would have their sunlamps on. It was the minimum light necessary to grow our super GM vegetable crop.

Kyr showed us the tally of food rations she'd made, too. The quantity surveyor didn't believe her, so redid the whole tally and came to the same conclusion.

For 6 years, we ate 2 meals a day. Then we ate 1.

It could have been worse. Around year 3, we discovered mushrooms growing out of the underside of the potato boxes. It was like mana, I tell you what.

Mana was old word for providence, which was another word for divine intervention.

Those mushrooms weren't divine intervention any more than the cave-in was a divine retribution, or the Alien was inevitable. It was luck, plain luck not good or bad, that mushroom spores had clung to the dirt coming with the potatoes, and that they'd managed to hit the right conditions to thrive.

And how's this for luck:

Mushrooms weren't even from our planet to begin with. That was why they never really fit in our classifications of Animal or Plant. Plants needed light to survive, by human definitions, you see, whereas Animals, like us, could live in the dark. But Animals could move, could think, they had mouths and stomachs, and mushrooms didn't have any of those things. They didn't fit anywhere in our standards.

There was a theory that mushrooms shipped a ride on a rock just like the Alien. Millennia ago, their rock hit our planet, and they scattered across the surface. After the impact winter faded, they unfroze and managed to find the perfect conditions for life. That was lucky for them and for us.

* * *

I knew mushrooms were as much aliens as the Alien because we had nothing else to do in the dark except talk. Some of that learning was bound to stick.

In low light, we set up the commercial shops off the main street like theatres. Instead of a screen, 1 person sat in front of us. In the dark, we'd take turns to tell stories. 6 rooms, 6 storytellers. The rest of us would wander back and forth and listen where we wanted. Sometimes the stories were angry stories about how life sucked because we were in a hole. Those stories weren't real popular, I tell you what. 1 guy had watched every episode of some ancient screenshow, so he told us the whole saga over a year, 1 night a week, that was great. So much sex. Another girl was religious, so she told us about the Old Testament, which is where I got some shut-eye and incidentally learned about mana. Once a fortnight, a civil engineer told us stories about how he'd banged women in Austria, Bangladesh, Carpentia, Denmark, and so on down the alphabet, that was a year of entertainment. The architect told stories about cities, walking through cities, seeing cities gone by now. The project manager told us stories about her children growing up, right from giving birth up to their tenth birthday, every single detail.

Sure, we'd forget to talk after a while. It was easy to forget to talk in the dark, not seeing any faces. We'd be slack about things like wearing clothes, especially after they started to wear thin. 7 years in there, it was never perfect, we'd stop telling stories or get bored or maybe we even ran out of stories. Someone would always start it up again. We'd filter back to those rooms and listen.

We had to work at sanity, like it was a marriage, or maintaining weight or fitness.

* * *

Arunta told stories about zombies walking in the dark, which was not good, because every scrape in the dark brought back the chills from his stories. He told other stories too, about his family, which he'd never even told me before. I couldn't tell you what was worse, his family or his zombies.

Arunta told me the cave-in lifestyle reminded him of being in correctional, back before he came to the Pit. 'Us boys,' he said. 'Nothing to do except eat, read recycled books, beat each other up, then work out with heavy weights so we could beat each other up but with the positions the other way around.'

'We're not beating each other up yet,' I said.

'Give it time.'

'Got nothing else to give it,' I said, but Arunta didn't laugh.


	8. Chapter 8

When Arunta got out of prison for glassing Jaysee in the face, he told me prison reminded him of being in the hole.

'This city's a hole,' I said. It was what he used to say.

Arunta disagreed. He said he'd been in enough holes now to tell the difference.

I reckon that was when he stopped being afraid.

* * *

Were we in prison?

It was a cave-in. It wasn't our fault, which made it the worst, the bloody worst. What had we ever done to deserve this?

Arunta didn't like it, but this time there was nothing to do. He told me he wanted to kill himself, except he was already dead. The cave-in was the only dreaming left in him.

Which was strange, because he did well in the dark. Better than most of us. He was our navigator.

He hated getting lost, so in those first days he'd use our 1 hour of low light to jog around slow and memorise the twists and turns. He was the first of us to wear out his boots completely, til we worked out how to patch them with cardboard and thread. He was the one who chiseled the symbols you'll find at every door, at every turn, not one of them more than arm's reach from the other. He tattooed our entire grave with chisel and hammer. We found our individual houses by the stars, the moons, the birds and the letters he'd put there. He grooved every wall with lines parallel to the floor, more lines for the further away from the centre we were, so even if we did get lost, we worked our way back just by counting the grooves at every corner.   
It took Arunta 2 years, 1 hour a day, 730 hours in total.

Despite his work, we lost 15 people to something in the dark. To being lost, I think. We lost another 3 to broken limbs turned septic. We lost another 7 to the big fever coming through the rain tower. They were superbugs, surprising we only lost 7. The toxins up above, plus the radiation, plus the rotting world of plants and animals lying around for years, freezing and unfreezing through the impact winter, no surprise diseases became something else entirely.

The 15 lost people were the mystery.

Arunta found out maybe they hadn't got lost. He led me there when the lights were on, and I wish to hell he hadn't. The cave-in had opened up to a vertical shaft, too deep for low light to reach the bottom or even the sides. It looked like a bottomless pool of black.

* * *

1 horror story Arunta told was about swimming in a billabong so deep, a great primordial monster lived at the bottom in water never seeing the light of day. It was so cold, that water. Every time the monster rolled over in its sleep, the cold water would stir, sending licks of itself up through the sunloving water, to wrap around the kicking legs of the swimming kids like tentacles, wanting to draw them down into dark of drowning. Some of the braver kids, or the crazier ones, would grab a hold of those tentacles of cold, which were truly so cold they were like ropes through the warmer water, and the kids would kick, kick, kick, trying to reach the bottom of that black pond, even though they knew it would kill them.

It was the fear, Arunta called those tentacles. Crazy kids or brave kids, they just couldn't let go of the fear.

For weeks, Arunta would seem fine. Then he'd take my hand, which was always strange. He'd lead me away from the story rooms and back to where we slept, or even further, to where the cave-in was.

After he'd dug Kyr out of the fall's edge, Runt climbed out of his Wombat to carry her somewhere safe. I remember Runt walking into the communal hub where we were still squawking headless, blood and dust and sweat on him, and Kyr the size of a kid in his arms. When he put her down, she said, 'Thank you,' nice as anything, and went bloody and dazed straight to find a console.

Thing is, carrying our future hero in to us like some kind of epic story, Runt left his Komatsu Wombat on the edge of the fall.

I hated seeing it. He refused to touch it. I thought about walking his Wombat away from the fall, but you just didn't touch another digger's interface. I hated seeing it because it was a nasty kind of reminder. 4 days of Komatsu Wombat digging, and we could've been out there, at the expense of everyone else who lived in the Pit.

To make it worse, 'Get me out of this hole,' Runt'd say, and he wouldn't be looking at me, he'd be looking at his Komatsu Wombat, rusting there, slow as sin.

I would have to hold him down, make him bite my wrist, and let him scream.

* * *

There were a lot of people chasing Arunta's tentacles of fear. We had Wombats. Dig. Dig. Dig. 4 days. 4 days! 12 years was bullshit! CoP abandoned us, CoP was dead, CoP expected us to die, we should do the unexpected and save ourselves.

And damn everyone else? we asked.

The architect and the doctor were old high school friends, coming up with this game called 'Ethical Conundrums.' 300 of us, minus the lost, would sit in a large space together and listen to a story which was an ethical conundrum. We were supposed to argue our point and convince everyone else what the right thing to do would be. It caused a lot of fights to begin with, because no matter how loud a person could shout, there was always someone louder.

Kyr worked out a system that we could have our arguments heard.

Just like in those first weeks, we formed groups of 3. 3 people came to a consensus on what they wanted to be said, and how they wanted it to be said. 3 was small enough that even the quiet could be heard, and large enough that even the loudest could be argued against. Working out what to say took at least 4 days. 1 out of those 3 would become Temporary Voice and go and meet up with another 2 Temporary Voices. They would talk, 4 days, 5 days, and come to a consensus about what they wanted to be said. Repeat, until out of 300 of us, 3 people stood out in front of us all and told us their thoughts on the ethical conundrum.

It wasn't about right or wrong answers, Kyr made a point of explaining. They were just voices, and their jobs were to tell us everything we thought.

It took at least a month of talking to get to those final 3, but what else did we have to do, in the dark?

* * *

The first real thing Kyr tested us out on wasn't even an ethical conundrum. A woman and a man wanted to have sex. They didn't want to have consequences.

This wasn't a problem for most of us. Everyone had compulsory contraceptive implants before we'd made the move to the Pit, men and women. Not, mind, that we weren't allowed to have babies. Anyone could have a baby. All we had to do was go to a doctor and ask for the implant to be removed for a specified period of time. We didn't have to be married, or rich. We didn't have to do anything except be bothered enough to ask.

The contraceptive had been the centre of 1 of the civil rights outcries before the big move, but we couldn't risk the overpopulation. The argument went: it'd only eliminate the accidental babies, those born because their parents had been too lazy to think about preventing it. Every kid born into the Pit was born out of choice.

Like I found out later, after Arunta and I signed up as foster parents, sometimes that still didn't mean anything.

The cave-in held only 1 woman who had asked for her implant to be removed, ready for the baby she had wanted to conceive before the cave-in. The cave-in also held only 1 man who had asked for his implant to be removed for similar reasons. Now, years later, those were the 2 who wanted to have sex. They didn't want to have a baby in the dark.

300 of us, and what were the odds?

Arunta stood up before the laughs had even stopped.

'Here,' he said, 'I got 6 condoms left. I've been fucking Katashi for years, don't think I need them any more. Not cos we're not going to be fucking. Just because we don't need them.'

'Is that Arunta?'

'Yeah, Kyr, and who else is Katashi fucking in the dark, you let me know when you see him.'

I said, 'Some day you're going to tell me why you keep carrying condoms to a day at work. You ain't getting lucky on lunchbreaks in my shift, that's for sure.'

Kyr said, over the giggles, 'Right, so we've got 6.'

Seems like other people had Runt's habit, because after everyone had spoken, we totalled 64 condoms into the communal pile. Kyr gave them to the doctor.

'Anyone who wants one,' she said, 'for whatever reason at all, come get one.'

'Does that include for waterbombs?'

'Use a latex glove,' the doctor said, without missing a beat. 'We got plenty of those.'

'Fantastic,' Runt said, probably a bit too loud.

* * *

We survived 7 years in the dark by eating and drinking and shitting and screwing and sleeping. We stayed sane because we talked.

In our 1 hour of low light, we did the food preparation, the laundry, the self-washing and grooming, hair trimming, shaving, the house cleaning. In our 2 hours of sun, we did nothing but lie there between rows of unhappy veg.

We were angry and threw powdered protein everywhere and argued.

We ran out of coffee and beer and soap. Never water, thanks to those fantastic rain towers, and never air. It wasn't our electricity that ran out, it was the globes, the only thing we'd forgotten to add to Kyr's lists.

Towards the end, the sunlamps were gone except for 2 brave globes. SuperGlobes, even.

The vegetables couldn't hack it. By year 6, the only fresh thing we consistently had was mushrooms and talk of mutiny.

The mutiny talk was the weird thing. We really didn't have a leader. Who were we going to mutiny against? If we wanted to walk out that deadly front door, if we agreed to walk out that deathtrap front door, Kyr would have agreed to it too.

* * *

Around year 4 in the dark, Arunta told me he could feel the colour and pattern of my tatts with his fingertips. I would've thought he was going insane, except he was doing it when he told me, leg and hip against me, holding my arm, rubbing his thumb along my skin, and I couldn't think of much else but him when he was touching me.

'That's the wave,' he said, drawing a curve. 'That's the sunrise, that historical fucker. This one's the spiral between them.'

'You bloody well drew them, of course you're going to guess them.'

'I can see them,' he said. 'With my fingertips. I'm kind of itching to give you more. It's been years since the last.'

'No ink in the dark. But I'm bored enough I'd probably let you, even without the light. I'd trust your freehand.'

Arunta laughed, unshaved cheek against my shoulder. 'I have a needle. I found it in the laundromat's base kit. No ink, though. Want me to finish that sleeve in red?'

He did have a needle, a thick one, like we used to repair our boots. He didn't have ink, but it was the action he wanted.

He did it like this: 1 hand against my arm, little finger and thumb pulling my skin tight. He made a pinch - a vice - with his forefinger against his thumb and held the needle loosely there. With his other hand, and a flick like you'd give to the back of your kid sister's ear, he sent the needle into my arm.

In the dark, no other feeling for distraction, it was like white hot metal being dripped onto my skin, 1 painstaking dot at a time. I let myself breathe heavy with it, so Arunta could hear me. I half-hypnotised myself trying to predict the next prick. There was never any warning.

I got hard before Arunta did, him rocking against my leg even as he finished off my arm. He put his mouth on that sore flesh and licked at me. When he kissed me, I could taste the blood.

It was alright. The tightness left him for as long as it took the red to fade, flaking off in little dots of scab. A few more weeks of sanity won.

'Better?' I asked him when the lights came on, and he could see the red-rawness of what he'd left on my arm.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Dreamings don't bleed.'

* * *

The other thing you couldn't to do a dream was stop its hair growing.

Arunta always dyed his hair. By year 3 of the cave-in, it got to the point of being halfway down his shoulders, exactly halfway black and halfway dirty blonde.

He steeled himself for days to cut it off. He argued with himself in the mirror, through that shiny, lonely hour of light per day. He was going to shave it, he told me and anyone who'd listen, 1 extreme to the next. He'd have to. He couldn't knife through it and leave it looking like a shagpile, he reckoned. He'd have to shave it. We were all going to have to shave or risk looking like ferals, then what would we be but a mixed up kind of prison crew!

Arunta worked himself up because it was fun, and everyone got on board with the game. Bets were laid with buttons as to whether he'd do it or not. There was Runt, knife in hand because we couldn't find scissors anywhere, mirror propped on the tables we only used in the commercial street, wide-eyed, ready to scalp himself for public entertainment.

At that point, 1 of the civil engineers stepped forward and said, 'I used to be a hairdresser, you know. Want me to razor it properly?'

Nothing would do for it but that we'd get our crop at the hands of an expert, after that. Right up to the point when the diggers dug us out again. Most well groomed bunch of unearthed zombies you've ever seen.

'Bet you're glad you didn't leave behind the hairdressers,' said the civil engineer.

* * *

I don't like mentioning the people I knew while I was under, not by name.

I think their names. 300 of them, including the lost, like the beads on my mother's necklaces. Arunta never talks about his family, never really talks about what his years of correctional were like, so I guess it's kind of like that. I remember them, that's all.

I talk about Kyr, though. It's hard not to mention Kyr, on account of the election.


	9. Chapter 9

Another thing that happened because of that cave-in, apart from my sister Sami being married and being murdered, was that word got out about how Kyr had looked after us. All those interviews, those news reports. Kyr was our network administrator, and we were her network. We didn't have to do anything except connect.

She became mayor. Later on, when the Pit opened up and we connected with the rest of the world, she became our Representative.

She wasn't a leader, I'd said it before. She didn't do anything inspiring. She didn't tell anyone what to do. Lots of others, like the doctor, some of the engineers, tried being the rally point in the dark, tried to stir us up, but Kyr kept keeping on, talking to people and making them talk. 

Later on I found out she'd come from a family of 17 children, and she was the middle one. 17! We didn't dare breed families like that any more. I'm glad Kyr's did, though, if that's where she learned to talk.

It would have surprised our ancestors, someone like Kyr becoming Rep. No surprise to us. Being under for 30 years, in total isolation, politics had become something different to what it was. We couldn't talk city to city. We were alone when we most needed to know that people were thinking of us. Kyr thought of us. Kyr thought of every 1 of us, and made sure we were thinking about every single other person, too.

She even visited Arunta in 100% voluntary prison once, after Runt had been beaten nearly to death for something or the other.

See, Runt called his prison stints 100% voluntary. What he said, years later, was that being trapped behind that cave-in was the real imprisonment, involuntary. There was nothing he could have done to avoid it.

All he'd needed to do to avoid voluntary prison was remember that everyone was fucked up at times, and that no one deserved to be glassed in the face because of it.

* * *

Whatever the tan of his skin, Runt bruised real easy. The Komatsu Wombat did him badly, always, big dark mottles on Runt's shoulders, and his hips where the casing pinched. I'd bruise him kissing, or fucking. It took me years to get over that and bite him like I wanted to, and even then I'd only do it where it wouldn't be seen, like the crease of his thigh or behind his knee.

Even sleep bruised Runt. He'd wake up with the skin of his forehead folded and cheek layered with lines, and where his skin had pinched, a line of bruise lingered there the whole day. Lack of sleep bruised him worse, eyes dug into their sockets like holes in the ground.

In the cave-in, his bruising got really scary after we started starving for real.

I'd only see Arunta that once a day, and every day, he had new bruises. What had he been doing to himself, pinching himself everywhere when I wasn't looking, trying to work out if he was his own dreaming?

Towards the end, people didn't like the lone surviving sunlamps. The GM seeds had expiry dates, and they'd reached them, and lighting up the lamps showed the dead dirt tanks and the humps of mushrooms poking out the sides. It would be me, Runt, and maybe only 30 others who craved the light. We'd lie around that room, like mushrooms that forgot we didn't really need this.

It was like that 1 day when I stared at Runt, covered with bruises and thin, and starving, but with his goddamned razor sharp hairstyle thanks to that civil engineer who was doing us more good as a hairdresser, when Arunta said, 'You've never looked at me like that before.'

I said, 'Like what?'

He said, 'Like we're going to die. You've never,' and he bloody choked, the bastard, 'you've never-- I been relying on you, I've been relying on you, you can't look at me like that.'

Arunta stood up. He said to me, to everyone there, 'I don't do this in public. I don't-- I hold your hand in the dark and we walk everywhere like that and we fuck in the dark like our lives fucking depend on it, but now you're staring at me with those bloody eyes, Katashi, and I can't deal with it. So I'm taking my clothes off and I'm crawling inside of yours, because we're not dying, and this way everyone's going to have something to laugh at instead of staring at me with eyes like that. Look at us, hugging in the mud. Look and laugh.'

'No one's going to say that, Runt,' someone else said, but Arunta cried, half out of his thin-as-bone shirt already:

'Well they fucking should, this sort of shit ain't meant for public eyes, is it? What's the point in doing it if it's not going to make you smile?'

It was the first time I'd seen him properly naked in years.

And he crawled inside my clothes and licked up my tatts like he'd missed the flavour, he licked my cheek and growled, 'You don't get this far hauling me along to die.'

I had to talk, my mouth was dry as the concrete I was lying on, I had to say something to him. 'Half way,' I said, because Kyr had lied to us at the beginning and told us 12 years, because she'd been lied to and told 10. '6 more years to go. Who's dying?'

'Why do you have to count everything?' Runt was biting me. 'You count everything. Numbers numbers numbers, that's you. Except it doesn't change 1 thing, tallying it up. Don't you ever look at me like that again.'

Arunta's bones were cutting me now that I could see them and feel them, I didn't know if I wanted to hold him or wrap him up in blankets. It was too hard to move, though, so we lay there and clenched at each other.

So, that was embarrassing.

* * *

But other people did it too, like they were waiting for someone to just break and do it first, holding each other under those last 2 sunlamps in the world. Rocking each other, saying nothing mostly, touching where the touching could be seen. 3 hours a day of light, so faint by now, so many globes blown, 3 generators down beyond any kind of repair.

It made me think of those days just before the Alien hit. Unlike the Pit, no one talked about what we were going to do when we got out. For a while, we forgot there had ever been anything but for this.

The sunlamps died completely by the end of that year.

We consolidated the street light globes into 1 street. It felt better having 1 bright place in that darkness instead of faint light everywhere. It meant we lived in the dark completely except for when we'd sit under the streetlights, reconstitute powder into protein, sometimes after sweeping it up off the street, and remember we'd once had things like Ethical Conundrums and story time and more than mushrooms.

Sure, we went mad.

* * *

Someone did tell a story. It was 1 of those stories you couldn't remember who told you. Maybe no one had, maybe it was born out of 300 of us thinking the same thing. Gotta have a lot of force, 300 people thinking the same thing. What we were thinking was: 

We were the only survivors.

The effort to bulwark the face of the Pit hadn't worked, and it'd collapsed in on the city, taking out the infrastructure necessary to survive. The growing fields went the way that ours did. A city full of people died. And if our little Australasian city had died, then probably the other ones had as well. Tokyo pit, dead by earthquake. Osaka pit, dead by rising tide in areas no one had predicted. Canberra pit, consumed by its own geothermal powers. Venice, the bubble city, emptied by plague. London's epic infrastructure, destroyed from the inside out by riot.

The mind is an amazing place.

Into year 7, we started to fight in bad ways. We went back to not talking. 2 people were raped, and Kyr got beaten up by people who wanted to be told what to do, not how to think. Someone took the food from our street, and Arunta raged, didn't move for 3 days until I told him ok, we were going to go fight and take it back. We did, he and me for everyone on our street, because he was 2.1m tall and I was built like a barrel. We fought like we were selfish and we wanted to live. Who knows what happened in the dark. We'd reconvene in the light, like the zombies of Arunta's stories, staring at what we'd done to each other while blind and not knowing what to say.

Thinking we were the only people left did strange things. There were no children. Maybe if we'd had children in with us it would've been different. Runt thought it would've been worse, because there's nothing worse than being told to suck it up by someone who's never known anything different, but suddenly, people were talking about having children. We should be having children. It was our duty to have children, even if we didn't want to. The contraceptives were criminal. We were the only ones left. Little groups got together to talk about this, not groups of 3 where every voice could be heard, but groups of 4 against 1, or 6 against 2, shouting each other down. Duty, duty, and duty, until we went deaf with it.

Seemed like a dumb idea to me, I tried to say, 1 against 6. Seemed to me like the only reason to have children was to give them more of the world, not less. I only got as far as 'dumb' before someone shouted me down. Apparently faggots didn't get a say in this 1, which made it a mystery why they'd come asking our opinion.

Runt didn't find it a mystery. Arunta knew. Runt stood up, knees cracking in the dark, before I could've known what was going on.

'You don't shout him down,' Runt said, and then his knuckles cracked in the dark, too. 'You don't say that to us. You don't come to our house expecting us to give our muscle to your stupid side when we shouldn't be having sides! You don't make a decision for 300 when there's only 6 of you sitting here!'

It felt like more than 6 against 2 when they started swinging fists.

* * *

'We're talking about rape,' Arunta said, to a street full of people and in the light, where no one had the courage to hit a face as bruised as that. 'We're making excuses. There's always a choice!'

'It's not,' said a painter, real shocked. 'This is survival.'

'And that is the dumbest excuse ever,' Runt said. 'What was the point of digging this Pit and surviving the Alien if we aren't better than 'survival' by now?'

'That is the point,' said a plumber. 'Because it is survival, innit? The Pit was-- if it'd worked it would've been a great idea, but it fucked up, and this is survival. We ain't ever going to get out of here. We should dig our way out, damned be the others and we gotta survive, right? God, I wasn't meant to live in the dark like this!'

Back in the day, Eskimos lived in the dark longer than this, I remember thinking. Something like that. Siberians. 6 months of winter. The first people on the moon, the rocket ship we'd sent out twenty years ago and never heard from again. Lifetimes in the dark, and the cold, less people and less food. We were angry only because we knew we had better.

'So now there's others still alive to damn?' Kyr said. 'You're going to be pretty damned embarrassed when you tip 1/2 the Pit onto the city, mate.'

'Noah's bloody arc!' someone shouted, 'there's 300 of us here, we're not going to be the last ones left!'

'I'm sick of it,' Runt said. 'This talk about surviving. Doing what's needed to survive. This isn't survival. This is life.'

'Nah,' I told him. 'This is survival. Our lives are out there in the Pit.'

He said, suddenly real quiet, 'Given up on dying, Katashi?'

I said, 'Only 5 more years to go, Runt. If we can make it without screaming.'

* * *

2 things happened as a result of everyone going mad.

1\. The last 15 condoms disappeared.  
2\. The Komatsu Wombats were sabotaged.

Kyr didn't take out the Wombats. Sure, she was worried someone would break and start digging, she came to me more than once to talk about how worried she was, but she wouldn't have done it. An engineer, maybe. Maybe even the diggers' supe did it.

The condoms were easier to solve. Arunta took them, said to me if we were going to start with the rapine and despair and pillaging then we didn't need them, did we?

The last condoms were glow-in-the-dark ones. Runt let them out in the light for 1 hour, next to his leg where we were sitting, without anyone knowing they were there. After the lights went out, before we'd slunk off, he inflated them quick and started hitting those brilliant balloons into the crowd. Not exactly waterbombs, but there's always something about people and balloons, especially glow-in-the-dark ones, great glowing balls floating through that giant black nothing. We started hitting them back.   
Beach volleyball, without a beach or a volleyball.

'Happy new year,' Runt said, hitting a balloon back into the air.

'Is it new year?' I asked.

'Don't know,' he said, 'happy birthday, if you want.'

7 years in the dark, and someone actually laughed.

* * *

CoP diggers broke through from the other side right about then. It made a fair bit of noise.

We ran to the cave-in entrance. You would not believe how we ran, starving and dying of scurvy and everything. Bouncing glowing condom balloons along, we ran. It took 3 diggers an hour to break through that last bit of rockfall, the slope behind them cleared for the churn to fall, no need to stop and tidy up. We watched and waited. It was light the whole time, getting lighter and lighter the closer they came. The diggers took off their masks and looked at us.

What do you say to zombies? Especially zombies with razor-cut hairstyles fondling condom balloons while they waited. Not to mention the way half of us were wearing adapted curtains instead of clothes. 7 years could be harsh on the seams.

'Oh, sure,' said 1 digger to the next, '7 years we've been digging, and here they are, having a flaming party.'

It was like coming out of prison, even 5 years early. It wasn't the city we'd known. It wasn't the city we'd built. The riots, remember? And the bugs, the fires, who knows what else. They happened while we were safely locked away.

A lot of people died. The Pit was 1/2 empty. Sometimes shit happens. You get on with it.

Kyr came into her own at exactly the right time.


	10. Chapter 10

The worst thing about the Alien was that it made every city in the world a pocket of self-conscious isolation. Every city in the world, stuck behind their personal cave-ins. Back to the dark ages, no networks, no connections, only the memory of having it better.

Our children, when we got back out and re-connected, couldn't believe that other cities existed. What Kyr did, talking to people, was make people remember how to form connections. Slow, ponderous, pain-in-the-arse time-consuming connections.

Our 3 to 3 to 3 communication chain, our Ethical Conundrums game became the foundation of Kyr's politics without politics.

'Honestly, I pretend I'm running shareholder committee meetings,' Kyr told me, once, seriously, right before she started laughing.

* * *

30 years after we closed the cover, the Alien was nothing but fragments in a crater. The toxic fires stopped years ago, the UV was back to bearable levels, the impact winter halfway balanced out. Hundreds of holes popped their tops, hundreds of bunkers opening blast doors. We resurfaced. While I was limping around to visit our kids, the first thing we did as a people was re-connect globally.

In the early days, diggers just dealt with digging the Pit, but a whole heap of other technicians and fabricators and manufacturers were building a satellite that would be able to survive the Alien's coming.

Then, to be sure, we built 12 of them. 8 survived.

We contacted the Boddington Pit first, then the Kimberly Pit, then Tokyo Pit and too quickly to count, Osaka, Canberra, Darwin, Denpasar, Hay, Karratha, Alice, London. The communications crews were going wild. Not all the stories were good. Some lines never ticked on. Some lines ticked on only for it to be made clear something had happened, cities of 20 000 where there had been 2 000 000, cities that came back with declarations of world supremacy and the advent of a new world order, originating with them, of course, but that was nothing new. It'd be dealt with, just like everything else.

The Boddington Pit was the one that said to us:

'Checked out the beach yet? You should go down. It's really nice. Take sunscreen.'

* * *

30 years below ground. Not even 1 human's lifespan. Cockroaches and mice survived. Not flies. Grass did, but a strange kind of grass. Dogs, cats, certain kinds of birds and other small mammals, carnivorous ones, who'd found caves and eaten each other, but not as fast as they could breed.

That was the world's surface, which had been scoured.

The icecaps melted at some point during the storms, or might have reformed, I don't know. The coasts were different. The oceans were warm. Tropical warm. The thing with the storm agitation going on overhead, the water was crazy with oxygen.

I'm guessing a lot of things died. Some things can't change, but out of what survived, it thrived. Standing up on that crest with my mum and Arunta and what people from the Pit could be bothered coming up, we looked down at that crystal clear ocean and saw forever. We could see coral like you wouldn't believe, the shadows of schools of fish, hundreds and hundreds of them, the almost gridded formation of seaweed over in another area, like it was all growing off a ledge planned for it, and it might've been, roads or carparks or something. There were whale sharks, and these weird new jellyfish that glowed at night that would have weighed more than me and Arunta stuck together.

The beach was nice. It was amazing. The first industry that rebirthed, apart from global communications and the reestablishment of a valid economy, was fishing, food packing, and the associated manufacturing.

We looked for a while, then went back home to get on with it.

What did we think was going to happen? We'd dig up where we'd been living for the last 30 years and settle on the beach because it looked nice?

* * *

'Fishing's going to be great,' Runt pointed out, while we were sitting on the crest of a dune. The water's edge was about 100 meters away. Even from up there we could see the silver as another school went past, shadows darkening that glowing coral. 'Fishing and trees, isn't that what you wanted? I remember. Fishing and trees. Good fishing, but shame about the trees.'

'Yeah, good, look at the size of that great shiny thing going past.'

'Katashi,' and Runt sounded so strangely serious even my mother had to turn and stare at him, 'can you be serious?'

'I'll try anything twice, you know that.'

'Honestly,' said Arunta, 'the only fishing you're ever going to do is for compliments.'

'Come on, that counts.'

Fishing and trees, fuck. It was easier than saying the only thing I'd ever dreamed of was a plain old life. Runt pegged me square. Up to that point, I had never seen a real live fish, just like I had never seen a real live tree.

Before Kalgoorlie, I'd spent most of my time on the streets in Perth, skating, getting tattoos, smoking, fucking, being hurt and being useless, out of my own choice. Mum couldn't have stopped me, shouldn't have. She kept me fed no matter where I crashed out, made sure I got some kind of a job even if it meant I had to go away from her. I had done nothing else with my life except dig, I'd never even learned to make coffee from grounds or learned to ink or cooked anything more complicated than a carbonara. I was a digger because that's what I did, and because that's what I did, I was a digger.

'I'd need hooks,' I said. 'I know that much from porn. I mean, movies, sorry, Ma. And lures, and weights.'

'Bait,' Arunta said.

'Bait. Worms, if we can dig up any. I've seen it on the screen. I would've been able to work it out if I'd ever had to try.'

'I never said you couldn't.'

'So long as we're clear on that. Whether or not I want to, though...'

Eventually, Arunta said, 'I know how to fish. My gran used to take me, before I got put away. I'll show you out when your knee's up to it again.' He scratched his own knee and said, 'It's boring, so we'll probably end up sleeping, or screwing.'

'That'd make a change,' my mum said.

I was hurt. 'Hey, for all you know it might've been a while.'

'Yeah,' Runt said. '14 hours. Not that Katashi's counting or anything.'

Right about them Mum put her hands over her ears, which was good, because then I could say: 'S'make an effort tonight, sweetheart. Split a sixpack, and commemorate the end of the end of the world.'

'Eh,' he said. 'Might need another couple of hours quality closet time before you go getting excited. Too much bloody variety in my diet these days.'

'Oh yeah, and it was so much better when we just had mushrooms.'

Arunta gave me 1 of his hopeful looks.

'Hey, don't look at me, I had coffee this morning, you know what that does to my gut.'

'Boys,' my mum said, suddenly, and a bit too loud because of her hands over her ears, 'Every day of your lives, you make me despair that it can never possibly get better than this.'

After a moment, I said to Runt, 'So when people ask us what we did to commemorate the end of the end of the world, are we going to tell them we got shitfaced?'

Arunta grinned, staring ahead at that impossible ocean, like it was the funniest thing I'd ever said.

* * *

We sat there for a while, being sandblasted. Runt dug up a few stalks of that strange grass everywhere, which seemed to survive by growing under the surface of the sand. Each time the wind blew it was uncovered, to be covered by the next gust. Survival in spurts, so to speak. The ocean made ocean sounds. Never thought I missed that, only to realise I had. There were others sitting on the sand with us, in pairs, families, the strings who had wandered up as they willed it. The children were great to watch, screaming with glee because the sun was setting. It'll come back, their grandparents were telling them. Promise it will!

Arunta shouldered me. 'I think the old lady's feeling her 5pm blood sugar drop coming on. Wanna go home?'

And you know, I didn't? I felt strange, like I was in a dream, and I didn't want to wake up. I said, 'I guess it'll be here tomorrow.'

'You hope.'

'Any reason why I shouldn't?'

* * *

Before the Alien, long before the Alien, there had been another kind of world crisis. Smart people envisaged the end of the world coming in a great tide of hungry humanity, devouring this world faster than the mushrooms could grow.

Smarter people thought about solutions. Different ways of devouring, that didn't destroy. Development, said those smarter people, not growth. Growth was cancerous.

In the worst of the dark days, when we were going mad, the architect told me what I thought was a story about people building a city in a tree. I'd heard wrong. The story was about people building a city that was a tree.

After the smart people worked out we were going to die, by Alien or by ourselves, smarter people tossed around a few different ideas. 1 idea came from a group of architects who spent their whole lives building imaginary cities. This team of architects once built an entire imaginary city for 2 000 000 people that was based on volume, not surface area. The city was cubic, 3 kilometers by 3 kilometers by 3 kilometers. That's 27 kilometers, for 2 000 000 people. Dense for some, spacious for others. The architects built everything into this city. Fantasy rainwater shafts, packed with purifiers, and a roof that collected water when it rained and generated condensation when it didn't rain and collected that instead. Farms and industrial precincts linked in great big chains so the wastes were useful, powering the next kind of industry along. Nothing created that couldn't be re-made. Levels, cities within cities, and no one was further than an hour's walk from anywhere else.

It was a fantasy city because none of the technology existed, and because no one had any reason to want to change.

When the Alien came we had all the reason not in this world to change.

The best way to describe the city, said the team of architects, it to call it a tree.

A cube? Nah, don't ever be deceived by the form of the thing. Form is nothing, the cover on the book, so to speak. A tree, an organism: that's what the city was It takes in poisons from the environment and outputs oxygen. It sustains ecosystems while being a part of one. It's a self-sustaining structure, where the structure itself is the infrastructure. It fosters life, and every waste product falls to the root and is used again, fertilizer or nutrients, reintegrated into the city's onwards growth. Call the city a tree, a living thing, that supports and sustains life itself. The shape is irrelevant.

Look at what a thing does to determine what it is.

To think, once upon a time we'd wasted all that time thinking we were living in a hole in the ground.


End file.
